quedarse: to stay
Quiero quedarme en la cama / aquí para vivir. = I want to stay in bed / I want to move here.
quedar con alguien: to meet up with someone
He quedado con Claudia. = I’m meeting Claudia. I hear the expression ‘digital nomad’, and I see a Youtube Yoga teacher couple with the so-cliched-it’s-almost-original name Boho Beautiful. I started practising with them during the Covid lockdowns. They broadcasted the glamour of stretching on the sandy shores of the world’s deserted beaches with nothing more than a pastel workout ensemble on their backs to my pandemic home. Even though I didn’t envy the places they got to see thanks to being ‘digital yogis’ (I think I’ve established at length that I don’t like beach), I was drawn to the cool mix of worldliness and liberty their I-can-work-from-anywhere lifestyle suggested.
Fast forward a few years. Moving to the suburbs of an Andalusian town for family reasons sent me into deep emotional turmoil, pining over the big city life I left behind in London. While the need to have a legal tax base limits how much time I can be outside of Spain each year, I have a contract that allows me to work remotely from anywhere in the EU within those time limits. And so, the idea to spend a summer, hopping from one EU capital to another was born. Digital nomadism but make it fiscally compliant por favor.
Bye bye suburbia At the end of May, my boyfriend and I set off to my friend’s empty flat in the heart of Madrid. Despite my 22.5kg suitcase I feel light. With my yoga mat and e-reader in tow, I am certain that I will be able to live it up anywhere without sacrificing the things I like to do in my free time. For this summer, home is anywhere that has a 1 million+ population and enough space to savasana.
Madrid A few weeks into our stay in Madrid I let my friend’s peeler glide over an Aldi carrot and think that more than any of the hip capital city cafes I’ve been working from, this epitomises the magic of life here. Instead of producing the usual straight peels, my friend’s tool creates curly carrot spaghetti, jazzing up my dinner with fun shapes and the taste of her generosity.
Berlin In July we flee Madrid’s never-ending heatwaves and cool off in Germany for a proper holiday. Our accommodation is called ‘Stayery’. Its non-committal suffix and foyer doubling up as co-working space aptly capture the neither here nor there quality of the digital nomad lifestyle I’d been picturing. In our tiny temporary kitchen, I become obsessed with a futuristic garlic press. Each clove splays open like the weeks of concentrated living ahead of us. Meeting up with school friends who moved to Berlin, I remember that more than a strong Wi-Fi connection, what matters is having people in your life who don’t mind if your breath stinks.
Amsterdam We end our nomad summer with August spent in my colleague’s flat in Amsterdam. Four weeks of buzzing around the coolest bars in digital nomad fashion. The true highlight though was what I call the Dutch fibre cable saga. Over three weeks, the energy provider KPN was attempting to install new cables in our residential building. This required all three tenant parties to be at home and provide access to their lodgings. Intense liaising across oceans and linguistic barriers with other tenants, the landlord and the KPN electrician culminated into the satisfaction of getting a communal job done.
Back to Cádiz Drafting this on the plane that is taking me back to Andalucía, I neither love the idea of living out of a suitcase for more than three months, nor of putting down roots in Cádiz permanently. But I do have a new appreciation for the feeling that comes from committing to people and a place, no matter how small. So I am ready to give Cádiz another chance. Who knows, maybe I’ll even meet someone new that I can share my carrot peeler with.
I wrote a series of posts about my summer in Madrid, Berlin and Amsterdam. You can find them here.